Borderviews

The World in a Sanded Grain

Winnipeg painter Eric Allan Cameron is making a big statement in a small way. He is producing a body of oil paintings on canvas paper, the largest of which is 20 x 15 cm and the smallest is 9.5 x 7 cm, on the subject of landscape, camping and fishing. The large painting shows a minimal landscape in which a fluctuating black horizon line stretches from one side of the composition to the other, while the water and sky are indicated through delicate blends of red and green. The small painting, which is Cameron’s favourite in the series, shows a float plane, so tiny the pontoons are only a suggestion in the water, viewed head-on. Both these paintings, and all the others in the series so far, are painted and then sanded down, sometimes as many as four times.
Beautiful Monsters

“I was thinking about the idea of how to build a more monstrous monster,” says Cindy Phenix, a Quebec-born artist who now lives in Chicago. In her most recent paintings she has concentrated on ways to picture these meta-figures performing acts of ambiguous purpose and meaning. About Birds, Blue and Strangers, 2019, shows a pair of women either caring for or conflicting with one another. The figure on the left wears blue pants, turquoise eye shadow and a slash of rouge across her cheek that looks more like blood than blush.
Magic Carpeting

The Druze artist Fatma Shanan has carpeted the world. Or less ambitiously, she has made a world for herself out of the carpet. Her strategy for the last decade has been to find a way to make the carpet a metonym for her own body and being. A common and revered domestic object, the carpet has been dislocated from its conventional context and made into a vehicle for introducing the tension among individual identity, the difficulty of achieving it and the necessary collective identity in Druze and Israeli culture.
A Streetcar Named Conspire

The Winnipeg General Strike, the events that provoked it and the developments that followed from it have become the source of what Winnipeg artist and filmmaker Noam Gonick calls “my enduring fascination.” The emblem of his ongoing engagement, a 32-foot-long public sculpture of a streetcar, commissioned by the Winnipeg Arts Council, will be unveiled on June 21.
A Woman of Many Parts

Caroline Monnet is sitting under a tree in Central Park in New York. It is the day before the artist’s opening of the 79th Whitney Biennial. The Montreal-based artist of Algonquin and French descent will show one video, Mobilize, in the main exhibition, and two more in the film complement of the exhibition that opens in September.
Etching the Language of History

“Memory is the crux of my practice,” says Toronto-based printmaker, sculptor and installation artist Emma Nishimura. When she interrogates how memory functions in her work, a series of questions emerge: “How do we share it, how does it weigh on us, how do we pass it on?” Nishimura, who won the prestigious Queen Sonja Print Award in 2018 from a list of 42 nominated printmakers around the world, is currently one of eight artists included in a compelling exhibition at the ROM called “Being Japanese Canadian: Reflections on a Broken World.”
The Unblinkered Vision

In 1952 Akbar Padamsee, a 24-year-old painter from Bombay, was awarded an art prize by André Breton in Paris for his painting Woman with Bird. It was a signal event in a life that took him back to India, where he set about to create a dialogue between artists in his country and the international avant-garde. From 1969 to 1972 in Delhi and Bombay, he established the Vision Exchange Workshop (VIEW) to further that interdisciplinary conversation. It met with mixed results in India, but his naming and vision have been picked up in Canada by curators Catherine Crowston from the Art Gallery of Alberta and Jonathan Shaughnessy from the National Gallery of Canada for “Vision Exchange: Perspectives from India to Canada,” an exhibition that opened last September at the AGA and that is currently on view at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, where it will remain through March 23 of this year. (It will then tour to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina and the National Gallery in Ottawa until 2020.)
The Angel is in the Details

VIE D’ANGE, Montreal’s “hippest” exhibition space, opened all five of its doors in the summer of 2015. Located in the Marconi Alexandra district, the gallery is a former automobile paint shop that also did oil and tire changes.
Vapour and Steel

Entropy is an idea that hasn’t worn out. It was central to the thinking and writing of Robert Smithson in the mid-’60s, and the psychologist and theorist Rudolf Arnheim wrote about the concept in his canonical 1971 essay on disorder and order.
A Visual Song of the Open Road

Kristine Moran, who now lives in Owen Sound, has given up her wheels. For the last 10 months, she and her husband and two young children toured the United States in a 30-foot-long Airstream trailer drawn by a Ford F-250.
Art Policing

The invitation card to Brian Hunter’s exhibition “Gut Feeling” at Winnipeg’s Library Gallery in May showed Hunter posed, like a Ken doll, in a t-shirt, socks and boxer shorts.
Paintings That Go on Somewhere Else

In 2014, after living in Brooklyn for 10 years, the Canadian painter Beth Letain moved to Berlin. She has always lived and worked in the neighbourhood around Kreuzberg, an area she describes as “a little shabby and literally covered in graffiti and posters. I find it especially enjoyable because it means there are a lot of people here marking things.”

Haven’t found what you're looking for? Explore our index for material not available online.